Anyone who views child pornography is at risk of going on to carry out sex attacks, experts have warned.

By Martin Beckford, Home Affairs Editor

7:00AM BST 14 Jun 2012

The Child Exploitation and Online Protection centre said that possession of indecent images of young people is now “alarmingly commonplace” and the threat has “grown exponentially with the advent of mass internet access”.

Some studies found that as many as 84 per cent of offenders who looked at degrading pictures or videos of young children had also carried out abuse in person.

The caseload of Ceop, the agency set up to combat online paedophilia, has almost tripled in a year because of growing use of the internet and social networking services, while the images being seized are becoming more extreme.

But police are struggling to investigate fully because of the proliferation of other online crime – such as fraud, cyber-bullying and offensive comments made by “trolls” – and the number of potential victims found in paedophiles’ photo collections.

Ceop called on forces to prioritise cases where suspects live with their families, as it believes having access to children and the opportunity to assault them can lead viewers of online pornography to carry out physical abuse.

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Its warning comes just days after the Deputy Children’s Commissioner for England, Sue Berelowitz told MPs that there “isn't a town, village or hamlet in which children are not being sexually exploited”.

Peter Davies, chief executive of Ceop, said in the foreword to a new report: “We found some compelling evidence that anyone who possesses indecent images of children must be considered a risk to children.

“We also found that, in many cases, it was an online investigation that finally lifted the stone on years of offline sexual abuse and harm, which otherwise would have continued unabated.”

The study detailed how the circulation of online child pornography has grown “dramatically” as the number of web users has risen from 100million worldwide in 1996 to 1.5billion people in 2010.

Back in 1990, the Home Office estimated there were just 7,000 printed indecent images of children in the whole country, but now police find individuals storing up to 2.5m pictures on a single computer.

At the same time, analysis suggests the images are becoming “more extreme, sadistic and violent” while ever-younger victims are becoming targeted.

Research suggests that those who carry out both “online” and “offline” abuse were themselves abused when young, and they are likely to be “educated, intelligent” white males aged between 19 and 45.

Apart from the unemployed, most of the 97 offenders surveyed by police recently had jobs in “schools and care work” while there were no professionals such as doctors, lawyers or accountants. Most lived with a spouse or partner and half had children.

Although Ceop said no one has proved that looking at child pornography causes offenders to go on to abuse children, there was a “clear correlation” between the crimes and that the former may “fuel fantasy”.

Lie detector tests had found that 84.5 per cent of child pornography viewers admitted to “contact” abuse.

Referrals to Ceop rose by 181 per cent between April 2011 and March this year while 26 police forces received 2,625 reports of indecent images. But half of police said they lacked capacity for specialist teams to investigate all cases.

The study warned that the “landscape of austerity” together with the “increasing volumes of work” meant that quick investigations are now “increasingly unachievable”.

Officers also raised concern about the fact that so many people are given cautions for possessing child pornography, with just 18 per cent going to jail in one area.

Ceop concluded that all reports that someone has child pornography mean a child is at risk and that officers should try to identify victims as well as searching online accounts, chat logs and search terms to uncover further crimes.